GERARD LANGLEY (THE BLUE AEROPLANES)

THE BLUE AEROPLANES’ UNIQUE AMALGAM OF ROCK, FOLK, POETRY, PUNK, DANCE AND ART HAS BEEN AN ACKNOWLEDGED INFLUENCE ON A WIDE RANGE OF THE COOLEST BANDS, INCLUDING REM AND RADIOHEAD.

Themselves informed by Television, The Velvet Underground and Syd Barrett, The Blue Aeroplanes have long combined pop smarts with serious weirdness through almost as many line-up changes as The Fall. The Bristol-based band have released almost thirty albums on various labels since 1983 debut BOP ART – several of which charted in the UK Top 40 and the US Alternative Top 10. 1990’s SWAGGER is an acknowledged classic, and the band undertook a memorable tour with REM in the late 1980s. Last week (and six years since 2011’s critically acclaimed ANTI-GRAVITY), The Blue Aeroplanes issued new album WELCOME, STRANGER!, recorded by the longest-lasting line up to date. In this new interview with The Mouth Magazine, frontman Gerard Langley discusses it…

THE NEW ALBUM BY THE BLUE AEROPLANES CAME OUT RECENTLY, AND THE TITLE – WELCOME, STRANGER! – FEELS AS IF IT MIGHT BE A LITTLE BIT ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT SOMEHOW…Someone recently suggested it might be to do with Brexit and Trump and all of that, actually. I thought of the title way way before those things, but I deliberately didn’t change it to anything else because of those things. Actually, that’s why the cover’s got a little rocket ship with an alien inside. It’s inclusive and welcoming. Basically “You’re all welcome”…

THERE’S A UK TOUR TO COINCIDE WITH THE RECORD. IT’S BEEN A BUSY TIME WRITING AND RECORDING IT, I DON’T DOUBT – BUT THINGS ARE ABOUT TO GET BUSIER?Yeah, they are. I was really looking forward to the album coming out, and I’ve been looking forward to touring it. But it didn’t feel like we’d been that busy leading up to it, actually. I suppose we must have been. I can’t really believe it’s been six years since the last record. It hasn’t seemed like six years since the last one, when I think about it now.

IS THE BLUE AEROPLANES SOMETHING YOU CAN ACTUALLY PICK UP AND PUT DOWN, OR IS IT SOMETHING THAT’S ALWAYS THERE FOR YOU? IF NOT PHYSICALLY, ARE YOU ALWAYS MENTALLY WORKING TOWARDS THE NEXT THING?
We seem to be quite busy… But we’re not… But we are… We’re actually always doing something. It’s quite a social band, actually. My brother’s in it. We all meet up quite regularly – and I’m always working on stuff I suppose. We’ve got our own rehearsal room at The Fleece (in Bristol) and, of course, I see Chris (Sharp, bassist and owner of The Fleece) all the time ‘cos we do venue stuff as well as The Blue Aeroplanes stuff. We’ve done quite a few gigs, festivals in Spain and so on. When Cherry Red reissued BEATSONGS a few years ago we did seven or eight dates on that… This current line-up is actually the longest line-up, it’s lasted four or five years. It started with me doing some jamming with Bec (Jevons, guitarist and front-person of I Destroy) and Mike (Youe), and coming up with stuff really quickly. We thought “Okay, this stuff is good – let’s do an Aeroplanes line-up around this”…

OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD, I CAN’T THINK OF ANOTHER BAND DOING QUITE WHAT THE BLUE AEROPLANES ARE DOING… THAT’S ALWAYS BEEN THE CASE, REALLY – SO I’VE NEVER KNOWN QUITE WHAT TO EXPECT. IS THAT WHAT KEEPS YOU GOING AFTER ALL THIS TIME – THE IDEA OF EXPLORATION AND CONFOUNDING EXPECTATIONS?
Yeah. I’m occasionally conscious of there being an Aeroplanes-shaped hole in the music biz… which we should be doing more to fill, I suppose. One of the things I’ve often thought is that I use that semi-spoken delivery, and though other people have done bits of it no-one’s done whole albums of it… But now there’s actually quite a lot of people doing it. Courtney Barnett, George The Poet, Kate Tempest… I’m not saying they’ve been influenced by The Blue Aeroplanes – I doubt they’ve heard of it. But what that means is that when we put a new album out now it’s into a world where people are already doing that, so it doesn’t sound quite so… on its own. There’s now a little genre that’s roughly in the same ball-park as what we’ve always done. It’s all come from different directions but it’s all wound up in the same place. I do find that quite interesting. Intriguing, even.

DO YOU EVER FEEL LIKE “WHO ARE THESE YOUNG PRETENDERS PISSING ON MY TURF”?
Ha ha ha… Noooo. I was always baffled that no-one else was doing it, to be honest. I just did an article about the Ten Best Songs Of All Time and I put PEDESTRIAN AT BEST in the list. You know, the Courtney Barnett song? That’s a really great song.

YOU’RE LEAD LECTURER AT BIMM, AND I WANTED TO ASK YOU ABOUT THAT BECAUSE (AS I JUST SAID) I’VE ALWAYS FELT THAT THE BLUE AEROPLANES APPROACHED THINGS FROM AN UNCONVENTIONAL ANGLE… HOW DOES THAT SIT WITH ‘CONVENTIONAL TEACHING’?I’m not actually sure there’s such a thing as ‘conventional teaching’, at least not in terms of songwriting. What I teach is that technical aspects are important but unconventional ideas can be more important. They’re what elevates a song from being a song to being a great song. I teach various techniques to students, or highlight various techniques, that they could apply to a technically perfect song to make it something else. You can construct something technically perfect but it can be very flat. It’s how you apply your ideas that can make elevate something and make something special. Equally, though, I think there’s this notion that all of the best music came entirely from the free-spirit or from drugs. You really do need that technical aspect in there. For instance, Kurt Cobain was actually an extremely gifted and highly adept technical writer – despite this idea that his was a free-flowing unconventional expression.

THE MUSIC OF NIRVANA DOES SEEM UNCONVENTIONAL, THOUGH I RECOGNISE THE CONVENTIONAL IN IT – I GUESS THAT’S ‘THE TRICK’… SO IN WHICH WAYS WAS KURT COBAIN TECHNICAL?Okay. Well, as an example, you know the song SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT? You know the bit “A Mulatto / An Albino / A mosquito / My libido”..? It’s very clever. It’s actually a joke, and it’s technically brilliant. Mulatto is a person of mixed race, so black and white, and an albino is as white as white can be. So it’s a diminution of his position. And a mosquito is very small, so Cobain’s also saying his libido is tiny. He’s commenting on himself there, almost certainly on the consequences of his addictions. How isolated he is; how reduced – so it’s serious stuff. But it’s a joke, the use of language. It’s lyrically clever in the way that it’s constructed. So that idea that greatness is only down to the free-spirit or drugs is not necessarily true. The Beatles were masters of this sort of thing. They started off as a highly efficient group, very tight… and then in the mid-to-late 1960s what you’ve got is a lot of very creative and interesting ideas added to that…

… THERE’S THE PERCEPTION THAT PAUL WAS ‘THE SHOWBIZ TECHNICIAN’ AND THAT JOHN WAS ‘THE EXPERIMENTAL ARTIST’… PAUL WOULD WRITE SOMETHING INCREDIBLY STRAIGHT – HE WOULD BE TRYING TO KEEP THE LID ON – AND JOHN WOULD BE TRYING TO TEAR THE SAME LID OFF…
That’s a very good way of putting it, and there is a degree of truth in that perception, I think – but that’s not actually that often the case. You get something like GIRL from John, which is an incredibly ‘straight’ song, almost clichéd in one way of looking at it… and yet a little later Paul comes up with WHY DON’T WE DO IT IN THE ROAD? which is quite unhinged… So they’re both very gifted writers and, importantly, both very capable of coming up with something very straight or something very weird. Expressive and emotional and artistic – but at the root of it they’re both actually very technical writers and both experts at applying creative technical ideas.

ON THE NEW ALBUM THERE’S A COVER OF SWEET LIKE CHOCOLATE (ORIGINALLY BY SHANKS & BIGFOOT)… YOU OBVIOUSLY HAVE AN EAR FOR A GOOD SONG, HOWEVER UNEXPECTED THAT SONG MIGHT BE…
Yeah. I was playing that in rehearsal with Mike, the guitarist, and I thought “Actually, I do really like this song”. The opening of it (which The Blue Aeroplanes do a bit like King Crimson or something – that stop / start intro) is actually from the original record. It was all on synths and I thought “If that was on guitar it would sound amazing“. So that’s what we did. Most people who’ve heard that so far haven’t realised it’s a cover. Someone recently said to me “I really like that song SWEET LIKE CHOCOLATE – but the problem is, it’s got the same title as this old pop song SWEET LIKE CHOCOLATE”. I said “It’s not just the same title. It’s the same song”…

YOUR OWN WRITING… DO YOU USE AUTOMATIC WRITING, OR ARE YOU MUCH MORE REGIMENTED ABOUT PUTTING DOWN WHAT YOU’RE TRYING TO SAY? I’M THINKING SPECIFICALLY OF THE SONG HONEY, I (FROM 1994 ALBUM LIFE MODEL). THE LYRICS ARE SO PRECISE THAT I CAN’T IMAGINE IT WAS AN EXERCISE IN FREE-FLOWING…Sometimes I write and draft things, but other times it happens very quickly. I remember writing JACK LEAVES / BACK SPRING in pretty much forty-five minutes. I was in a hotel room in LA. I read it down the ‘phone to two different people and they both cried. I thought “Well, that’s finished. That one’s done”… Sometimes something can be almost done but a couple of lines don’t work. So then what you’ve got to do is get ones that do – and that can take a long time. So sometimes the majority of a song can be done quickly, but finishing it can take a lot longer. I can’t remember with HONEY, I… But I do know I really like the French translation.

YEAH, THAT’S A BEAUTIFUL MOMENT. I’VE ALWAYS FELT THERE WAS SOMETHING OF ROBYN HITCHCOCK IN THAT TRACK, ACTUALLY – THE DELIVERY, DEFINITELY, AND PERHAPS EVEN SOME OF THE LYRICS… OVER THE COURSE OF THE BLUE AEROPLANES OUTPUT I’VE ALSO OCCASIONALLY BEEN REMINDED OF RICHARD THOMPSON…Yeah, sort of. I see what you mean – but with Robyn I think it’s more like a mutual influence from Syd Barrett rather than any direct line from Robyn himself. We both come from the same root of things… As for Richard Thompson… Even in my first band, before The Blue Aeroplanes, we made a decision not really to use ‘blues notes’ or jazzy stuff, ‘cos we felt ourselves to be quite an English band… Richard Thompson is one of the few major guitar players who does that – who uses, like, modal techniques. Angelo, the guitarist in the band, was very very taken with that. So his playing, back when he was in The Blue Aeroplanes, was definitely ‘school of Thompson’. Angelo’s now the guitarist in Massive Attack so he doesn’t actually use that side of it very much, but that’s what he was doing when he was with us. I really really really like Richard Thompson. Yeah… Fairport Convention are one of my all-time favourite bands.

POSSIBLY MUCH MORE INFLUENTIAL THAN HISTORY SEEMS TO RECORD…Oh, yeah. Definitely. I remember having this discussion with Peter Buck about this in the late 1980s. Especially at that time, there was a school of bands which you couldn’t really call either musically American or British. They were kind of Trans-Atlantic bands. So, to explain that in the context of REM and us… Television were really influential to us, and they were as important as the Sex Pistols. And Fairport Convention were as important as Jefferson Airplane, or something. So for those bands it’d been a real mixture of that stuff – these influences coming from both sides.

I’M GLAD YOU MENTIONED TELEVISION. I ALWAYS FELT MARQUEE MOON HAD SOMETHING OF A BEARING OVER THE BLUE AEROPLANES, TOO…
MARQUEE MOON, along with Patti Smith’s HORSES… They were the first sort of vanguard of what was going to go on and become punk music, I think. I really really like MARQUEE MOON – but I’d actually have liked it even more if Richard Hell had still been involved. I don’t think he should have fired him… Anyway, if you mix up Richard Hell & The Voidoid’s BLANK GENERATION album and the MARQUEE MOON album then you have almost the perfect statement.

YOU ALSO MENTIONED REM A MOMENT AGO… IT’D BE PRETTY DIFFICULT TO THINK OF A FINER ENDORSEMENT THAN THE ONE YOU RECEIVED FROM MICHAEL STIPE…Yeah. Michael reviewed the deluxe reissue of SWAGGER that was put out a few years ago, for the REM website. He said that he’d always wanted to do a sort of Lou Reed spoken-word delivery in a song but that he’d never actually had the courage to do it. Then he’d watched me doing it every night on tour [The Blue Aeroplanes supported REM on the GREEN tour in 1989]. Hearing me do it gave him the impetus to go on and do BELONG (on REM’s 1991 album OUT OF TIME) and then something like E-BOW THE LETTER (on NEW ADVENTURES IN HI-FI, 1996). That was pretty… flattering.

WHAT WERE REM LIKE TO TOUR WITH?
It was a really nice tour, that. On the first day of the tour Michael came into our dressing room and introduced himself, which a lot of major headliners don’t bother to do. When you’re in a band like REM, it’s not really about record sales or touring and selling out these massive shows. It really is about the music… There was quite a lot of mutual admiration there as well, ‘cos we had some really good guitarists and they all got on with Peter. And Michael’s great. We got on really well.

TO ROUND UP… THERE WAS A LEGENDARY MOMENT BACK IN 1989, DURING YOUR SUPPORT SET AT THE REM SHOW AT THE HAMMERSMITH ODEON… YOU HAD TWELVE OR THIRTEEN (OR WAS IT FOURTEEN?!) GUITARISTS ON STAGE AT THE SAME TIME…
It was sixteen, actually… Ha ha…

… HA HA… THAT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN THIS TIME IS IT, ON THIS CURRENT TOUR?
Sixteen extra hotel rooms – so I don’t think so, no! Ha ha… Well, that came about because there was a guy playing with REM, a guy called Peter Holsapple. He came into our dressing room at the second Hammersmith Odeon gig and asked “We’ve kind of heard you invite extra people onstage to play guitar on your last song?” and we were, like, “Yeah? We do”… and he said “Well, how come you haven’t invited us, then?” – so… they all came on stage…

LAST NIGHT OF THE TOUR MADNESS ..?
Well, it was meant to be the last night, but it sold out so quick that they added a show at the Birmingham NEC. So, we were doing that at Hammersmith and as I was coming off stage I was thinking “I’d really like to do that when we play the NEC!”… I said to Peter “Did you enjoy that, then?” and he said “That fucker Michael put his guitar into the same amp” – which basically cut Peter’s volume in half… He said “Hmmm. Tomorrow night I’ll have an amp just for me, my own amp” – so I thought “Great, we are doing it again at the NEC”… And he says “I’ll blow you fuckers off stage”…